Progress in Human Geography 22,2 (1998) pp. 165±185
The end of geography or the
explosion of place?
Conceptualizing space, place
and information technology
Stephen Graham
Centre for Urban Technology, Department of Town and Country Planning,
University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK
Abstract: This article critically explores how the relations between information technologies and
space and place are being conceptualized in a broad swathe of recent writings and discourses on
the geographies of `cyberspace' and information technologies. After analysing the powerful role
of spatial and territorial metaphors in anchoring current discourses about information technologies and society, the article goes on to identify three broad, dominating perspectives. These I
label the perspective of `substitution and transcendence' (dominated by technological Utopianists), the `co-evolution' perspective (drawing from political economy and cultural studies) and the
`recombination' perspective (derived from recent work in actor-network theory). The discussion
turns to each in turn, extracting the geographical dimensions and implications of each. The article
concludes by considering the implications of the discussion for spatial treatments of society±
technology relations and for broader debates about the nature of space and place.
I
Introduction: cyberspace, spatial metaphors, space and place
It is now widely argued that the `convergence' of computers with digital telecommunications and media technologies is creating `cyberspace' ± a multi-media skein of digital
networks which is infusing rapidly into social, cultural and economic life. Cyberspace
is variously defined as a `consensual hallucination, a graphic representation of data
abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system` (Gibson, 1984: 51); a
`parallel universe' (Benedikt, 1991: 15); or a `new kind of space, invisible to our direct
senses, a space which might become more important than physical space itself [and
which is] layered on top of, within and between the fabric of traditional geographical
space' (Batty, 1993: 615±16).
c Arnold 1998
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0309±1325(98)PH191RA
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
Interestingly from the view point of geographers, the recent growth of discourses on
`cyberspace' and new communications technologies, even the very word `cyberspace'
itself, have been dominated by spatial and territorial metaphors (Stefik, 1996). `Cyberspace', suggests Steve Pile (1994: 1817), `is a plurality of clashing, resonating and
shocking metaphors'. The expanding lexicon of the Internet ± the most well-known
vehicle of cyberspace ± is not only replete with, but actually constituted by, the use of
geographical metaphors. Debates about the Internet use spatial metaphors to help
visualize what are, effectively, no more than abstract flows of electronic signals, coded as
information, representation and exchange. Thus, an Internet point-of-presence becomes a
web site. The ultimate convergent, broadband descendant of the Internet is labelled the
information superhighway. A satellite node becomes a teleport. A bulletin board system
becomes a virtual community or an electronic neighbourhood. Web sites run by municipalities become virtual cities (see Graham and Aurigi, 1997). The whole society-wide
process of technological innovation becomes a wild-west-like electronic frontier awaiting
colonization. Those `exploring' this frontier become Web surfers, virtual travellers, or, to
Bill Mitchell (1995: 7), electronic flaÃneurs who `hang out on the network'. The Internet as
a whole is variously considered to be an electronic library, a medium for electronic mail or
a digital marketplace (Stefik, 1996). And Microsoft seductively ask `Where do you want to
go today?' And so the list goes on and on.
Such spatial metaphors help make tangible the enormously complex and arcane
technological systems which underpin the Internet, and other networks, and the growing
range of transactions, social and cultural interactions, and exchanges of labour power,
data, services, money and finance that flow over them. While many allege that networks
like the Internet tend to `negate geometry,' to be `anti-spatial' or to be `incorporeal'
(Mitchell, 1995: 8±10), the cumulative effect of spatial metaphors means that they become
visualizable and imageably reconstructed as giant, apparently territorial systems. These
can, by implication, somehow be imagined similarly to the material and social spaces
and places of daily life. In fact, such spatial metaphors are commonly related, usually
through simple binary oppositions, to the `real', material spaces and places within which
daily life is confined, lived and constructed.
Some argue that the strategy of developing spatial metaphors is `perhaps the only
conceptual tool we have for understanding the development of a new technology'
(Sawhney, 1996: 293). Metaphor-making `points to the process of learning and
discovery ± to those analogical leaps from the familiar to the unfamiliar which rally
the imagination and emotion as well as the intellect' (Buttimer, 1982: 90, quoted in
Kirsch, 1995: 543). As with the glamourous, futuristic technological visions, or dark,
dystopian portraits within which they are so often wrapped, these technological metaphors `always reflect the experience of the moment as well as memories of the past. They
are imaginative constructs that have more to say about the times in which they were
made than about the real future' (Corn, 1986: 219).
But the metaphors that become associated with information technologies are, like
those representations surrounding the material production of space and territory
(Lefebvre, 1984), active, ideological constructs. Concepts like the `information society'
and the `information superhighway' have important roles in shaping the ways in which
technologies are socially constructed, the uses to which they are put, and the effects and
power relations surrounding their development. Metaphors also encapsulate normative
concepts of how technologies do or should relate to society and social change, as the use
of `shock' and `wave' metaphors in the writings of Alvin Toffler shows (see Toffler, 1970;
Stephen Graham
167
1980). They can even be used to represent the very nature of society itself, as the widespread use of `information society' and `information age' labels currently testifies. Here
technologies are seen to embody metaphorically the very essence of contemporary
cultural, economic, geographical and societal change. This brings with it, of course, the
attendant dangers of relying on simple technological determinism in thinking about how
new technologies are related to social, and spatial, change. As Nigel Thrift (1996a: 1471)
contends, `in this form of [technological] determinism, the new technological order
provides the narrative mill. The new machines become both the model for society and its
most conspicuous sign'.
Too often, then, the pervasive reliance on spatial and technological metaphors actually
serves to obfuscate the complex relations between new communications and information
technologies and space, place and society. In the simple, binary allegations that new
technologies help us to access a new `electronic space' or `place', which somehow
parallels the lived material spaces of human territoriality, little conscious thought is put
to thinking conceptually about how new information technologies actually relate to the
spaces and places bound up with human territorial life. Without a thorough and critical
consideration of space and place, and how new information technologies relate to, and
are embedded in them, reflections on cyberspace, and the economic, social and cultural
dynamics of the shift to growing `telemediation', seem likely to be reductionist, deterministic, oversimplistic and stale.
In this article I aim to explore some of the emerging conceptual treatments of the
relationships between information technology systems and space and place. Building on
my recent work with Simon Marvin on the relationships between telecommunications
and contemporary cities (Graham and Marvin, 1996), and on conceptualizing telecommunications-based urban change (Graham, 1996; 1997a), I identify three broad,
dominating perspectives and explore them in turn. First, there is the perspective of
substitution and transcendence ± the idea that human territoriality, and the space and
place-based dynamics of human life, can somehow be replaced using new technologies.
Secondly, there is the co-evolution perspective which argues that both the electronic
`spaces' and territorial spaces are necessarily produced together, as part of the ongoing
restructuring of the capitalist political-economic system. Finally, there is the recombination
perspective, which draws on recent work in actor-network theory. Here the argument is
that a fully relational view of the links between technology, time, space and social life is
necessary. Such a perspective reveals how new technologies become enrolled into
complex, contingent and subtle blendings of human actors and technical artifacts, to
form actor-networks (which are sociotechnical `hybrids'). Through these, social and
spatial life become subtly and continuously recombined in complex combinations of new
sets of spaces and times, which are always contingent and impossible to generalize.
II Substitution and transcendence: technological determinism, generalized
interactivity and the end of geography
Both the dominant popular and academic debates about space, place and information
technologies adopt the central metaphor of `impact'. In this `mainstream' of social
research on technology (Mansell, 1994), and in the bulk of popular and media debates
about the Internet and `information superhighway', new telecommunications technologies are assumed directly to cause social and spatial change, in some simple, linear and
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
deterministic way. Such technological determinism accords with the dominant cultural
assumptions of the West, where the pervasive experience of `technology is one of
apparent inevitability' (Hill, 1988: 23). Here technology is cast as an essential and
independent agent of change that is separated from the social world and `impacts' it,
through some predictable, universal, revolutionary wave of change. Thus, that central
purveyor of cyberspace rhetoric, Wired magazine, proclaimed in their 1996 (pp. 43±44)
`Manifesto for the digital society' that:
the Digital Revolution that is sweeping across society is actually a communications revolution which is
transforming society. When used by people who understand it, digital technology allows information to be
transmitted and transmuted in fundamentally limitless ways. This ability is the basis of economic success around
the world. But it offers more than that. It offers the priceless intangibles of friendship, community and
understanding. It offers a new democracy dominated neither by vested interests of political parties nor the mob's
baying howl. It can narrow the gap that separates capital from labour; it can deepen the bonds between people
and planet.
In terms of the `spatial impacts' of current advances in communications technologies,
two broad and related discourses have emerged from the loosely linked group of
technological forecasters, cyberspace commentators and critics who found their commentaries on simple technological determinism (that is, extrapolating the `logic' of the
spatial impacts of telecommunications from the intrinsic qualities of the technologies
themselves). First, there are widespread predictions that concentrated urban areas will
loose their spatial `glue' in some wholesale shift towards reliance on broadband,
multimedia communications grids. Advanced capitalist societies are thus liberated from
spatial and temporal constraints and are seen to decentralize towards spatial and areal
uniformity. Secondly, there are debates about the development of essentially immersive
virtual environments, which, effectively, allow the immersive qualities of geographical
place to be transmitted remotely.
1
Areal uniformity, urban dissolution and generalized interactivity
The geographical effects on space and place of the supposedly wholesale `technological
revolution' based on new information and communications technologies become fairly
easy to establish, if one follows an essentialist, cause-and-effect and deterministic logic
through. As technologies of media, computing and telecommunications converge and
integrate; as equipment and transmission costs plummet to become virtually distance
independent; and as broadband integrated networks start to mediate all forms of
entertainment, social interaction, cultural experience, economic transaction and the labour
process, distance effectively dies as a constraint on social, economic and cultural life (The
Economist, 1995). Human life becomes `liberated' from the constraints of space and
frictional effects of distance. Anything becomes possible anywhere and at any time (see
Graham and Marvin, 1996). All information becomes accessible everywhere and anywhere. The `logic' of telecommunications and electronic mediation is therefore interpreted as inevitably supporting geographical dispersal from large metropolitan regions,
or even the effective dissolution of the city itself (Gillespie, 1992; Graham, 1997a).
Most common here is the assumption that networks of large metropolitan cities will
gradually emerge to be some technological anachronism, as propinquity, concentration,
place-based relations and transportation flows are gradually substituted by some
universalized, interactive, broadband communications medium (the ultimate `Information Superhighway'). To Baldwin and colleagues (1996), for example, this all-mediating
Stephen Graham
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network, this technological Holy Grail of fully converged telephony, TV, media and data
flow, embellished with virtual shopping and interactive video communications, is
already in sight, with the trials of so-called full-service networks (FSNs) in cities like
Orlando, Florida. `We now have', they write (1996: 1),
a vision of an ideal broadband communication system that would integrate voice, video and data with storage of
huge libraries of material available on demand, with the option of interaction as appropriate. The telephone, cable,
broadcast, and computer industries, relatively independent in the past, are converging to create these integrated
broadband systems.
Linked to virtual reality (VR) technologies, such networks, it is argued, will provide, online and instantaneously, all the richness and subtlety of the immersive communications
once available only through place-based interactions in urban areas. `In urban terms',
writes Pawley (1995), `once time has become instantaneous, space becomes unnecessary.
In a ``spaceless city'', the whole population might require no more than the 30 atom
diameter light beam of an optical computer system.'
Such substitutionist arguments, in fact, have a long lineage. Assumptions that
advances in telecommunication will `dissolve' the city have a history as long as electronic
communication itself. Caroline Marvin (1988), in her book When old technologies were new,
recounts the many assumptions in the late nineteenth century that the seemingly
fantastical technologies of the telegraph, wireless and telephone would annihilate space
constraints through minimizing time constraints. Social, cultural and geographical
differences were to be obliterated in the world-wide shift to ubiquitous, universally
accessible telecommunication. According to Edward Bellamy, writing in 1897
(pp. 347±48), `wherever the electric connection is carried . . . it is possible in slippers
and dressing gown for the dweller to take his choice of the public entertainment given
that day in every city of the earth'.
Three quarters of a century later, Marshall McLuhan argued that the emergence of his
`global village' meant that the city `as a form of major dimensions must inevitably
dissolve like a fading shot in a movie' (McLuhan, 1964: p. 366, quoted in Gold, 1990:
p. 23). In 1968, Melvin Webber famously predicted that `for the first time in history, it
might be possible to locate on a mountain top and to maintain intimate, real-time and
realistic contact with business and other societies. All persons tapped into the global
communications network would have ties approximating those used in a given
metropolitan region' (Webber, 1968: 1096). And the futurists Naisbitt and Aburdene,
riding a wave of excited speculation in the late 1980s and early 1990s about the future
`information society', saw `a new electronic heartland of linked small towns and cities as
laying the groundwork for the decline of cities' (Naisbitt and Aburdene, 1991: 329).
Anthony Pascal (1987: 602) extrapolated this logic, arguing that:
the era of the computer and the communication satellite is inhospitable to the high density city. What once had to
happen in the city can now take place anywhere. With the passage of time [will come] spatial regularity; the urban
system converges on, even if never quite attains, complete areal uniformity. The newly emerging technologies will
soon begin to provide excellent substitutes for face-to-face contact, the chief remaining raison d'eÃtre of the
traditional city.
Such technologically determinist predictions also resonate surprisingly strongly with
some of the more critical recent perspectives of the relationships between space, place
and technological change. For example, Paul Virilio (1993), a French urban theorist and
philosopher, recently suggested that a culture of `generalized interactivity' is emerging,
based on pervasive, ubiquitous and multipurpose telematics grids, through which
`everything arrives so quickly that departure becomes unnecessary' (Virilio, 1993: 8).
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
Such a transition, suggests Virilio, will amount to nothing less that a `crisis in the notion
of physical dimension' (1993: 9) of space, place, the region and the city. `The archaic
``tyranny of distances'' between people who have been geographically scattered', he
writes, increasingly gives way to the `tyranny of real time . . . The city of the past slowly
becomes a paradoxical agglomeration in which relations of immediate proximity give
way to interrelationships over distance' (Virilio, 1993: 10). Physical movement through
transportation also evaporates in this schema, leaving a growing inertia, a sedentary and
secluded dystopian urban landscape where
the shift is ultimately felt in the body of every city dweller, as a terminal citizen who will soon be equipped with
interactive prostheses whose pathological model is the `motorized handicapped' equipped so that he or she can
control the domestic environment without undergoing any physical displacement (Virilio, 1993: 11, emphasis in
original).
2
`Mirror worlds', the transmission of place and world transcendence
Virilio's predictions of the evaporation of the material, physical dynamics of space and
place find support in the more optimistic perspectives of `cyber-gurus' like Nicholas
Negroponte (1995) and Bill Gates (1995). Again, the substitution ethos dominates here,
with the assumption that sophisticated VR technologies, switched over broadband global
grids, will allow immersive, 3D environments to become so life-like that `real' places will
easily become substitutable. David Gelerntner (1991) imagined that such technological
trends will lead to the construction of `mirror worlds', immersive electronic simulations
tied into real-time monitoring apparatus which would allow us to `look into a computer
screen and see reality. Some part of your world ± the town you live in, the company you
work for, your school system, the city hospital ± will hang there in a sharp colour image'
(Gelerntner, 1991: 1; see also Graham, 1998). More recently Nicholas Negroponte (1995:
165), Director of MIT Media Lab, asserts that:
digital living will include less and less dependence upon being in a specific place at a specific time, and the
transmission of place itself will start to become possible. If I could really look out the electronic window of my
living room in Boston and see the Alps, hear the cowbells, and smell the (digital) manure in summer, in a way I
am very much in Switzerland.
Such technologically evangelistic debates about `digital living' therefore suggest that we
are on the verge of accessing a technological infrastructure which will do little less than
provide some single, immersive system to mediate all aspects of human life. The
implication is that the very concepts of material space, place and time, and the body, will
be rendered problematic, even obsolete. We will shed, as Benedikt (1991) put it, the
`ballast of our materiality', escaping the physical, corporeal domains of the body, the
territorial earth, and space and time in the process (Slouka, 1995: 25). Human societies,
cultures and economies are seen simply to migrate into the electronic ether, where
identities will be flexibly constructed, any services might be accessed, endless fantasy
worlds experienced and any task performed, from any location and at any time, by
human agents acting inside the limitless domains of constructed electronic environments.
Presumably, as human life becomes more and more dominated by what Thu Nguyen
and Alexander (1996: 117) call `participation in the illusion of an eternal and immaterial
electronic world', the material world of space and place would become gradually
eviscerated. Pascal's shift towards `complete areal uniformity', of homes and buildings
providing equally-spaced entry points into the pure and liberating cyberspace realm,
would be underway. Many cyberspace enthusiasts do, indeed, proclaim the need for
Stephen Graham
171
what Schroeder (1994) has termed `world rejection'. Here cyberspace is seen to offer an
alternative territoriality, an infinitely replenishable and extendible realm of spatial opportunity that counters the finitudes and problems of the increasingly crowded and
problematic material spaces on earth. Don Mapes, for example, urges us `to do away
with our territoriality'. To him, `the good news is: cyberspace is big. It's basically infinite.
Earth is limited, it's finite. In cyberspace, if you don't like it, you can move onto the next
frontier. There's always another continent in cyberspace' (Mapes, 1994, in Channel 4,
1994).
Of course, the foundations for such technological Utopianism, and determinism, are
woven deeply into the very cultural roots of modern capitalist society (Marvin, 1988;
Smith and Marx, 1995). Discourses of modernity and `progress' have been widely constituted through technological promises of brave new worlds with universal, beneficent,
totalizing shifts and secular technological Utopias variously promulgated by pulp
science fiction, comic books, futurists, architects and `city of the future' visionaries,
advertisers and technology firms (Corn and Horrigan, 1984). The context of global
environmental and social crises, as Hayles points out, merely accentuates the longstanding existential temptations to construct and believe in simple technological
panaceas and escapes. `In a world despoiled by overdevelopment, overpopulation,
and time-release environmental poisons', she writes, `it is comforting to think that
physical forms can recover their pristine purity by being reconstituted as informational
patterns in a multidimensional computer space. A cyberspace body, like a cyberspace
landscape, is immune to blight and corruption' (Hayles, 1993: 81, cited in Robins, 1995:
138).
III Co-evolution: the parallel social production of geographical space and
electronic space
The strong leaning of contemporary technological discourse towards substitution and
transcendence perspectives, I would argue, tends to perpetuate little but dangerous myth
and fallacy. In proffering new technologies as some complete and simple substitutes for
the material body, the social world, and for space and place, its proponents do little to
advance understanding of the complex co-evolutionary processes linking new information
technologies and space, place and human territoriality. In allocating technologies almost
magical transformative powers, in implying the easy emergence of universal social and
spatial access to computer networks, and in radically overestimating the degree to which
such networks can simply substitute for, and transcend, place-based, face-to-face interaction, Kevin Robins (1995: 139) has argued that they say more about their own (usually
masculine) `omnipotence fantasies' than about how complex combinations of placebased and telemediated interactions co-evolve. As he suggests, such perspectives rest on a
common vision of a future that will be different from the present, of a space or a reality that is more desirable than
the mundane one that presently surrounds and contains us . . . All this is driven by a feverish belief in
transcendence; a faith that, this time around, a new technology will finally and truly deliver us from the
limitations and frustrations of this imperfect world' (Robins, 1995: 135).
Fortunately, however, a much more sophisticated understanding has been developed
recently through our second broad perspective which explores how the social production
of electronic networks and `spaces' co-evolves with the production of material spaces and
places, within the same broad societal trends and social processes (see Mosco, 1996:
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
173±211). Three strands of work have emerged here: analysing the articulation between
place-based and telemediated relationships; addressing the linkages between telecommunications and the city; and theoretically analysing the broader roles that new
telecommunications and information technologies play in supporting the production of
new types of spatial arrangements.
1
Articulations between place-based and telemediated relationships
Rather than assuming some simple substitutional relationship, our second perspective
suggests that complex articulations are emerging between interactions in geographical
space and place, and the electronic realms accessible through new technologies. The
argument here is that, because cyber-evangelists are naively obsessed with the abstract
transmissional capabilities of information technologies, technologically determinist
debates usually neglect the richness and embeddedness of human life within space
and place. Sawhney (1996: 309) criticizes the `very transmission-oriented view of human
communication [in cyberspace debates]. The purpose of human communication is
reduced to transfer of information and the coordination of human activity. The ritual or
the communal aspect of human communication is almost totally neglected'.
Technologically determinist commentators are accused of failing to appreciate the
social, cultural and economic dynamics of place and space that cannot be simply
telemediated no matter how broadband, 3D or immersive the substitutes. Quite the
reverse, in fact, because the human construction of space and place is seen actually to
ground and contextualize applications and uses of new technologies. `The urban world
networked by [Bill] Gates' technologies ``strung out on the wire'' ', argues Denis
Cosgrove (1996: 1495), `is not disconnected, abstract, inhuman; it is bound in the places
and times of actual lives, into human existences that are as connected, sensuous and
personal as they ever have been'. Kevin Robins (1995: 153) believes that `through the
development of new technologies, we are, indeed, more and more open to experiences of
de-realization and de-localization. But we continue to have physical and localized
existences. We must consider our state of suspension between these two conditions'.
2
Telecommunications and the city
This `state of suspension' or articulation between place-based and electronically
mediated realms is especially evident in the contemporary metropolis, which, despite
some trends towards the decentralization of routine service functions (OTA, 1995), shows
no sign of simple, wholesale evisceration. Globally, urbanization trends are unmatched
in history in their intensity; the global urban system continues to dominate the planet
economically, politically, socially and culturally; transportation flows and demands are
spiralling at every scale; and even the large industrial cities in the UK and USA that
recently were shedding population are showing some signs of an (albeit patchy)
economic and cultural renaissance, and demographic turn round. In short, new communications technologies are not simply substituting for the experience of, or reliance on,
metropolitan places. Rather, a complex co-evolution, articulation and synergy between
place-based and telemediated exchange seem to be emerging. Ron Abler (1995: 3) rebels
`instinctively . . . against the notion that a digitally-created version of real place
constitutes an acceptable substitute for the real thing'. Equally possible, he feels, is
the emergence of place virtuality where urban residents are able to `tap into the
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digitally-available resources of the world to enrich reality in real places. By its very
nature, virtual reality implies the possibility if not the probability of real virtuality'
(Abler, 1995: 3).
Drawing on McLuhan, Castells (1996: 373) similarly posits that the new, integrated
media systems will bring with it what he calls a `culture of real virtuality' drawing
diverse participants and fragmented communities into new symbolic environments in
which `reality itself (that is, people's material/symbolic existence) is entirely captured,
fully immersed in a virtual image setting, in the world of make believe, in which
appearances are not just seen on the screen through which experience is communicated,
but they become the experience'. While increasingly encompassing, however, such
exchanges do not simply substitute for place-based material social worlds. Rather, they
embody complex global±local articulations between the `space of places' and the `space
of flows' (Castells, 1996: 423±28).
After all, as with television, radio and printing technologies, any cursory examination
of the Internet and World Wide Web shows that much of the traffic actually represents and
articulates real places and spaces, supporting and generating physical mobility, tourism,
transport and trips for the highly mobile, eÂlite groups that currently use it in the process.
Fast-growing so-called `virtual cities', for example, help to ground and integrate the Web
activities within a particular metropolitan area. This adds coherence and legibility to the
otherwise chaotic interplay between the Internet and urban space, allowing electronic
spaces to be articulated to feed back positively on to the development dynamics of
particular cities (see Graham and Aurigi, 1997).
As I show with Simon Marvin in a recent book (Graham and Marvin, 1996),
cyberspace is, in fact, a predominantly metropolitan phenomenon which is developing
out of the old cities. In terms of hard infrastructural investment, demand for services and
rates of innovation, the largest, globally orientated metropolitan areas are clearly
maintaining their dominance. Thus, while New York has around 7% of the USA
population, 35% of all outgoing USA international calls start there. While London has
17% of the UK population, 30% of all UK mobile phone calls are made there. And while
Paris has 16% of the French population, it commands 80% of all investment in telecommunications infrastructure in France (Graham and Marvin, 1996: 133).
The work of Jean Gottmann (1982) has clearly demonstrated that the incorporation of
computer networks into the economic, administrative and sociocultural dynamics of the
city merely intensifies and adds further capability to the older functions of the post, the
telegraph and the telephone. The maintenance of control over ever-more complex urban
and regional systems, straddling ever-larger distances, and spread over larger and larger
metropolitan corridors and regions, becomes possible. Rather than simply substituting or
revolutionizing the city, and flows of people and material goods, the evidence suggests
that new technologies actually diffuse into the older urban fabric offering potential for
doing old things in new ways. Urban transportation and infrastructure systems can be
managed and controlled more precisely, improving capacity. Telecommunications coevolve with transportation and physical flows, sometimes replacing (telebanking for
branch networks, email for post), sometimes generating (travel TV programmes and
conference and retail adverts), and sometimes enhancing transport capability (automatic
route guidance) (see Graham and Marvin, 1996). The extending and intensifying grids of
travel, trade and tourism actually rely on the enhanced control and co-ordination
capacities of IT at every stage and scale. For example, 50 000 electronic exchanges of all
sorts are estimated to lead up to one flight of a Boeing 747. And within cities, new
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
technologies allow the time and space limits surrounding consumption, work, entertainment, social networks and travel to be managed more flexibly. Thus, the spaces of the
city may be constructed within a broader, and more complex, urban field networked
together by more sophisticated, integrative technological networks (Boyer, 1996).
New information technologies, in short, actually resonate with, and are bound up in,
the active construction of space and place, rather than making it somehow redundant.
William Mitchell's notion of `recombinant architecture' is especially relevant here,
because it demonstrates how constructed and produced material spaces are now being
infused with cyberspace `entry points' of all kinds (Mitchell, 1995). Material space and
electronic space are increasingly being produced together. The power to function economically and link socially increasingly relies on constructed, place-based, material
spaces intimately woven into complex telematics infrastructures linking them to other
places and spaces. `Today's institutions', argues Mitchell (1995: 126), `are supported not
only by buildings but by telecommunications and computer software.' Thus the
articulation between widely stretched telematics systems, and produced material spaces
and places, becomes the norm and is a defining feature of contemporary urbanism.
`Constructed spaces', he suggests,
will increasingly be seen as electronically-serviced sites where bits meet the body ± where digital information is
translated into visual, auditory, tactile or otherwise sensorily perceptible form, and vice versa. Displays and
sensors for presenting and capturing information will be as essential as doors (Mitchell, 1994).
Bookstores, libraries, universities, schools, banks, theatres, museums and galleries,
hospitals, manufacturing firms, trading floors and service providers increasingly become
embodied through their presence in both material spaces and electronic spaces. While
some substitution is evident ± for example, with the closure of banking branches
paralleling the growth of telebanking ± much of the traditional, nonroutine face-to-face
activity within constructed spaces, and the transportation that supports it, seems
extremely resilient to simple substitution. In other words, the contemporary city, while
housing vast arrays of telematic `entry points' into the burgeoning worlds of electronic
spaces, is a cauldron of emotional and personal worlds and attachments, an engine of
reflexivity, trust and reciprocity (Amin and Graham, 1998).
The usefulness of the co-evolution perspective is that it underlines the fact that
materially constructed urban places and telecommunications networks stand in a state of
recursive interaction, shaping each other in complex ways that have a history running back
to the days of the origin of the telegraph and telephone (and as the continued urban
dominance of telecommunications investment and use makes clear; see Thrift, 1996a).
Major urban places support dense webs of face-to-face `co-presence' that cannot ± and
will not ± be simply mediated by telecommunications (Boden and Molotch, 1994). This is
because they are vital supports to high-level business activities in a risky and volatile
global economy (Storper, 1996); because the new urban culture relies on them; and
because face-to-face social life derives from them.
The complex articulations between the local and global dynamics of both material
places and electronic spaces have recently been explored by Staple (1993). He believes
that the Internet and other communications technologies, far from simply collapsing
spatial barriers, actually have a dialectic effect, helping to compress time and space
barriers while, concurrently, supporting a localizing, fragmenting logic of `tribalization'.
Far from unifying all within a single cyberspace, the Internet, he argues, may actually
enhance the commitment of different social and cultural interest groups to particular
material places and electronic spaces, thus constituting a `geographical explosion of
Stephen Graham
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place' (Staple, 1993: 52). This `new tribalism', exemplified by the use of the Internet to
support complex diasporas across the globe, and to draw together multiple, fragmentary
special interest groups on a planetary basis, `folds' localities, cities and regions into `the
new electronic terrain' (Staple, 1993: 52).
But it is important to stress that the ways in which places become enmeshed into
globally stretched networks like the Internet will be a diverse, contingent process. A wide
diversity of relations seems likely to exist between the urban structures and systems, and
indeed the particularities of culture, of different spaces and the growth of telemediated
interaction. Bolter (1995: 2) speculates on the diversity of the diverse configurations
linking urban form with cyberspace:
Perhaps the Japanese will construct cyberspace as an extension of their dense urban corridors. On the other hand,
people can live in the suburbs and participate in cyberspace from their homes, as many Americans do now. Or, as
Americans do, they can commute between one cyberspace location in the workplace (a corporate communications
system) and another in their homes (American Online). Thus cyberspace can be a reflection of the American
suburbs and exurbs, the Japanese megacities, or the European combination of large and medium-sized cities.
Cyberspace need not be the uniform entity suggested by the current metaphor popular in the United States the
`information superhighway.
3
Telecommunications, `spatial ®xes' and the production of space
Theoretical perspectives drawing on critical political economy serve to exemplify further
the ways in which new telecommunications systems are materially bound up with the
production of complex new social and economic geographies. Reacting against the allencompassing and overgeneralized concepts of the `global village' and `time-space
compression', Scott Kirsch (1995: 544, emphasis in original) argues that `by resorting to
the rather cartoonish shrinking world metaphor, we lose sight of the complex relations
. . . between capital, technology, and space, through which space is not ``shrinking'' but
rather must be perpetually recast'.
While new information and telecommunications technologies support more flexibility
in the way production interests, services and media firms, tourists and investors treat
space, they do not herald some simple shift to a world of pure, absolute mobility. Rather,
time and space barriers become reconstituted and reformed within global geometries of
flow, incorporation and exclusion. `The mobility of commerce, organisations, information
and people does not make time and space irrelevant, rather, it highlights the extent to
which these areas of experience have become more, not less, multi-layered, interrelated,
and complex' (Ferguson, 1992: 79). Places become increasingly shaped and constructed
through their incorporation into powerful, corporate networks of flows and exchange.
Far from leading to some areal homogeneity, as in some substitutionist visions, such a
logic accords asymmetric power to global transnational corporations (TNCs) to scrutinize
and exploit the exact locational attributes of places, as they strive to piece together
seamlessly integrated, and ever more fine-grained international divisions of labour
(Castells, 1989).
Perhaps the clearest exploration of how telecommunications become woven in to the
production of new geographical landscapes of production, consumption and distribution
at all spatial scales comes from Eric Swyngedouw (1993: 305). Building on the work of
Harvey (1985), he argues that every social and economic activity is necessarily geographical. It is `inscribed in space and takes place' (emphasis in original). Human societies
`cannot escape place in the structuring of the practices of everyday life' (p. 305). Within
an internationalizing economy, capitalist firms and governments must continually
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
struggle to develop new solutions to the tensions and crisis tendencies inherent within
capitalism, between what David Harvey calls `fixity' and the need for `motion', mobility
and the global circulation of information, money, capital, services, labour and commodities (Harvey, 1985). Currently, such tensions and crises arise because increasingly widely
dispersed areas of production, consumption and exchange, befitting of the internationalizing economy, need to be integrated and co-ordinated into coherent economic
systems. Space thus needs to be `commanded' and controlled, on an increasingly international scale.
To do this, relatively immobile and embedded fixed transport and telecommunications
infrastructures must be produced, linking production sites, distribution facilities and
consumption spaces that are tied together across space with the transport and communications infrastructure necessary to ensure that a spatial `fix' exists that will maintain
and support profitability. Without the elaboration of ever more sophisticated and
globally stretched transport and communications infrastructures, Harvey (1993: 7) argues
that `the tension between fixity and mobility erupts into generalized crises, when the
landscape shaped in relation to a certain phase of development . . . becomes a barrier to
further [capital] accumulation'. Thus, new telecommunications networks `have to be
immobilised in space, in order to facilitate greater movement for the remainder' (Harvey,
1985: 149). Swyngedouw (1993: 306) elaborates:
A communications line . . . liberates actions from place and reduces the friction associated with distance and other
space-sensitive barriers. However, such transportation and communications organisations can only liberate
activities from their embeddedness in space by producing new territorial configurations, by harnessing the social
process in a new geography of places and connecting flows . . . In short, liberation from spatial barriers can only
take place through the creation of new communications networks, which in turn, necessitates the construction of
new (relatively) fixed and confining structures.
Crucially, then, the political economic perspective underlines that the development of
new telecommunications infrastructures is not some value-neutral, technologically pure
process, but an asymmetric social struggle to gain and maintain social power, the power
to control space and social processes over distance. As any investigation of, say, the
growth of global financial centres, or the extending global coverage of corporate
telematics networks will soon discover, power over space and power over telecommunications networks go hand in hand. For example, Graham Murdock draws the
striking parallel between the `fortress effect' generated by many postmodern office
buildings, and the development of vast, private `dataspaces' on corporately controlled
networks. He argues (1993: 534) that `here, as in territorial space, continuous battle is
being waged between claims for public access and use, and corporate efforts to extend
property rights to wider and wider areas of information and symbolization'.
By demystifying, and unpacking, the social and power relations surrounding telecommunications and the production of space, the political economic perspective does much
to debunk the substitutionist myths of technological determinism discussed above. It
allows us to reveal the socially contingent effects of new technologies, the way they are
enrolled into complex social and spatial power relations and struggles, and the ways in
which some groups, areas and interests may benefit from the effects of new technologies,
while others actually lose out. Thus, `the increased liberation and freedom from place as
a result of new mobility modes for some may lead to the disempowerment and relative
exclusion for others' (Swyngedouw, 1993: 322).
An excellent example of this is the current transformation of utility markets, under
pressures of competition and liberalization, and the experiences of consumers at different
Stephen Graham
177
ends of the market (Graham, 1997b). On the one hand, affluent consumers will have
`smart meters' which use telematics to allow them to access supplies for many, distant,
competitors in a `virtual market' for energy, from the comfort of their own homes. On the
other, over 4 million poorer UK electricity consumers have already had their electromechanical utility meters turned into electronic `prepayment' meters. These lock
consumers into one supplier and need to be `topped up' electronically before use,
necessitating a physical journey to the post office ± a major problem for many with
already poor mobility, health problems, and poor physical services.
Building on Giddens' (1990) work on time-space distanciation, Paul Adams (1995) uses
the concept of `personal extensability' to capture how a subject's (telemediated and
physical) access to distant spaces, services and places may allow him or her to extend his
or her domination over excluded groups and so support the production of divided
spaces and cities. `One person's (or group's) time-space compression', he writes, `may
depend on another person's (or group's) persistent inability to access distant places.' As
Adams states, `the variation of extensability according to race, class, age, gender, and
other socially-significant categories binds micro-scale biographies to certain macro-level
societal processes' (Adams, 1995: 268; see Massey, 1993: 66).
Thus, within cities, forms of `telematics super-inclusion' (Thrift, 1996b) emerge for eÂlite
groups, who may help shape cocooned, fortified, urban (often now walled) enclosures,
from which their intense access to personal and corporate transport and telematics
networks allows them global extensability. Meanwhile, however, a short distance away,
in the interstitial urban zones, there are `off-line' spaces (Graham and Aurigi, 1997), or
`lag-time places' (Boyer, 1996: 20). In these, often-forgotten places, time and space remain
profoundly real, perhaps increasing, constraints on social life, because of welfare and
labour market restructuring and the withdrawal of banking and public transport
services. It is easy, in short, to overemphasize the mobility of people and things in
simple, all-encompassing assumptions about place-transcendence (Thrift, 1996c: 304),
which conveniently ignore the splintering and fragmenting reality of urban space.
To Christine Boyer (1996: 20), the highly uneven geography of contemporary cities,
and the growing severing of the `well designed nodes' of the city from the `blank, inbetween places of nobody's concern', allows fortunate groups to `deny their complicity'
in the production of these new, highly uneven, material urban landscapes. But perhaps
the most extreme example of the complex interweaving of new technologies, power
relations, and the production of space and place comes with the small, eÂlite group who
run the global financial exchanges in world cities. Here, we find that `the extensible
relations of a tiny minority in New York, London, and Tokyo, serve to control vast
domains of the world through international networks of information retrieval and
command' (Adams, 1995: 277).
IV
Recombination: actor-network theory and relational time-spaces
Our third and final perspective takes such relational views of the social construction of
technology further. Anchored around the actor-network theories of Michel Callon (1986;
1991) and Bruno Latour (1993), and drawing on recent theorizations of Donna Haraway
on the emergence of blended human-technological `cyborgs' (or `cybernetic organisms' ±
see Haraway, 1991), a range of researchers from the sociology of science, science, technology and society, cultural anthropology and, increasingly, geography have recently
178
Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
been arguing for a highly contingent, relational perspective of the linkage between
technology and social worlds. Actor-network theory emphasizes how particular social
situations and human actors `enrol' pieces of technology, machines, as well as documents, texts and money, into `actor-networks'.
The perspective is fully relational in that it is `concerned with how all sorts of bits and
pieces; bodies, machines, and buildings, as well as texts, are associated together in
attempts to build order' (Bingham, 1996: 32). Absolute spaces and times are meaningless
here. Agency is a purely relational process. Technologies only have contingent, and
diverse, effects through the ways they become linked into specific social contexts by
linked human and technological agency. What Pile and Thrift (1996: 37) call a `vivid,
moving, contingent and open-ended cosmology' emerges. The boundaries between
humans and machines become ever more blurred, permeable and cyborgian. And
`nothing means outside of its relations: it makes no sense to talk of a ``machine'' in general
than it does to talk of a ``human'' in general' (Bingham, 1996: 17). Nigel Thrift (1996a:
1468) summarizes the approach:
no technology is ever found working in splendid isolation as though it is the central node in the social universe. It
is linked ± by the social purposes to which it is put ± to humans and other technologies of different kinds. It is
linked to a chain of different activities involving other technologies. And it is heavily contextualised. Thus the
telephone, say, at someone's place of work had (and has) different meanings from the telephone in, say, their
bedroom, and is often used in quite different ways.
This linkage of heterogeneous technological elements and actors, strung across distance,
is thus seen as a difficult process requiring continuing efforts to sustain relations which
are `necessarily both social and technical' (Akrich, 1992: 206). The growing capabilities of
telecommunications, for supporting action at a distance and remote control, do not
therefore negate the need for the human actors which use them to struggle to enrol
passive technological agents into their efforts to attain real, meaningful remote control.
`Stories of remote control tend to tell of the sheer amount of work that needs to be
performed before any sort of ordering through space becomes possible' (Bingham, 1996:
27). Such `heterogeneous work involving programmers, silicon chips, international
transmission protocols, users, telephones, institutions, computer languages, modems,
lawyers, fibre-optic cables, and governments to name but a few, has had to be done to
create envelopes stable enough to carry [electronic information]' (Bingham, 1996: 31).
Thus there is not one single, unified cyberspace; rather, there are multiple, heterogeneous networks, within which telecommunications and information technologies
become closely enrolled with human actors, and with other technologies, into systems of
sociotechnical relations across space. As Bingham (1996: 32) again argues, `the real
illusion is that cyberspace as a singular exists at all', rather than as an enormously varied
`skein of networks' (Latour, 1993: 120) straddling, linking and weaving through different
spaces. Thus, we need to consider the diverse, and interlinked, physical infrastructures of
information technologies (cable, public switched telephone networks, satellite, mobile,
microwave, Internet grids, transoceanic optic fibres, etc.), and how they support the vast
panoply of contingent actor-networks.
`Cyberspace' therefore needs to be considered as a fragmented, divided and contested
multiplicity of heterogeneous infrastructures and actor-networks. For example, there are
tens of thousands of specialized corporate networks and intranets. The Internet provides
the basis for countless Usenet groups, Listservers, corporate advertising sites, specialized
Web sites, multi-user dungeons (MUDs), corporate intranets, virtual communities and
increasingly sophisticated flows of media and video. Public switched telephone networks
Stephen Graham
179
(PSTNs) and the many competing telecoms infrastructures support global systems of
private automatic teller machine (ATM) networks, credit card and electronic clearing
systems, as well as blossoming applications for CCTV, tele-health, teleshopping and telebanking, global logistics, remote monitoring, back office and telesales flows, electronic
data interchange (EDI), electronic financial transactions and stock market flows, as well
as data and telephony flows. And specialized systems of satellite, broadband, cable and
broadcasting networks support burgeoning arrays of television flow. Each application
has associated with it whole multiplicities of human actors and institutions, who must
continually struggle to enrol and maintain the communications technologies, along with
other technologies, money and texts, into producing some form of functioning social
order. These, and the hundreds of other actor-networks, are always contingent, always
constructed, never spatially universal, and always embedded in the microsocial worlds
of individuals, groups and institutions. Such sociotechnical networks `always represent
geographies of enablement and constraint' (Law and Bijker, 1992: 301); they always link
the local and nonlocal in intimate relational, and reciprocal, connections.
Such a fully relational perspective has important implications for the ways in which we
conceptualize place, space and time. For actor-network theory suggests that, rather than
simply being space and time transcending technologies, telecommunications systems
actually act as technological networks within which new spaces and times, and new
forms of human interaction, control and organization are continually constructed
(Latour, 1987).
Similarly relational rather than absolute theories of time-space are rapidly gaining
influence in geography and urban studies (Harvey, 1996: Thrift, 1996a). The unthinking
acceptance within urban studies that time and space act simply as objective, unvariant,
external containers for the urban scene is now collapsing (Harvey, 1996: 256). Harvey
draws on Whitehead's relational theories to suggest that the heterogeneous experience
and construction of time within cities is a very real phenomenon. `Multiple processes', he
writes, `generate multiple real as opposed to Leibniz's ideal differentiation in spatiotemporalities' (Harvey, 1996: 259, emphasis in original). Crucially for the conceptualization of place is his notion of `cogredience' or `the way in which multiple processes
flow together to construct a single consistent, coherent, though multi-faceted time-space
system' (Harvey, 1996: 260±61). Thus `place' becomes an embedded and heterogeneous
range of time-space processes; neighbourhoods, cities and regions, by implication,
`cannot be examined independently of the diverse spatio-temporalities such processes
contain' (Harvey, 1996: 263±64). As Nigel Thrift (1996a: 2) puts it, drawing on his longstanding work on time geography (Thrift et al., 1978), `time is a multiple phenomenon;
many times are working themselves out simultaneously in resonant interaction with each
other.'
The continual recombination of the world, within actor-networks and their specific
`different spaces and different times', is possible because the Internet and other information and communications systems are based on `technological networks'; these, despite
the rhetoric of universality, are always specific and contingent in linking one place to
another. To Latour (1993: 177±18), such technological networks
are composed of particular places, aligned by a series of branchings that cross other places and require other
branchings in order to spread. Between the lines of the network there is, strictly speaking, nothing at all: no train,
no telephone, no intake pipe, no television sets. Technological networks, as the name suggests, are networks
thrown over spaces, and they retain only a few scattered elements of those spaces. They are connected lines, not
surfaces. They are by no means comprehensive, global or systematic, even through they embrace surfaces without
covering them, and extend a very long way.
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Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
The merit of the actor-network perspective is the way it articulates human-technological
recombinations and relationships through a rich, contextual, mapping which avoids
essentializing sociotechnical relations. As an analytic perspective it helps to capture the
complex and multiple relational worlds supported by information technologies. Its
emphasis on sociotechnical `hybrids' further underlines the growing difficulties of easily
separating something called the `social' (or, for that matter, the `spatial') from the
`technological'. Rather than hypothesizing macrolevel technological `revolutions' it
stresses multiple, contingent worlds of social action, underlining the difficulties involved
in achieving social ordering `at a distance' through enrolling complex arrays of technological artifacts. In it humans emerge as more than just subjects whose lives are to be
`impacted'; as more than bit-players within macrolevel processes of global structural
change. Actor-network theory underlines forcefully that `living, breathing, corporeal
human beings arrayed in various creatively improvised networks of relation still exist as
something more than machine fodder' (Thrift, 1996a: 1466).
Work by Thrift (1996a; 1996b; 1996c) has used actor-network theory to show how
highly concentrated urban spaces like the City of London, far from suffering some simple
dissolution, have, over the past century, actually been continually recombined with new
technological networks: the telegraph, telephone and, most recently, the telematics
trading system. Such new technologies, he writes, do not produce some `abstract and
inhuman world, strung out on the wire' (Thrift, 1996a: 1480); they are subtly recombined
with the spatial and social practices of workers and managers, operating within the
complex, material and social spaces of the City.
Often, the use of faster and faster telematics systems actually increases the demands for
face-to-face contact so that the interpretive loads surrounding information glut can be
dealt with rapidly and competitively. `The major task in the information spaces of
telematic cities like the City of London', writes Thrift (1996a; 1481), `become interpretation and, moreover, interpretation in action under the pressure of real-time events'. Thus
the production of new material spaces, and the social practices that occur in them, is
neither some technological cause-and-effect, nor some simple political-economic
machination. Rather, it is
the hybrid outcome of multiple processes of social configuration processes which are specific to particular
differentially-extensive actor-networks (made up of people and things holding each other together) and generate
their own space and own times, which will sometimes, and sometimes not, be coincident. There is, in other words,
no big picture of the modern City to be had but only a set of constantly evolving sketches (Thrift, 1996a: 1485).
V
Conclusions: space, place and technologies as relational assemblies
Two clear conclusions for how we might address the linkages between space, place and
information technology emerge from our discussion of the three broad substitution,
co-evolution and recombination perspectives.
First, we need to be extremely wary of the dangers of adopting, even implicitly,
deterministic technological models and metaphors of technological change. The choice of
words here is important. For example, the very notion of a technological `impact', so long
a central feature of mainstream technological debates in urban and regional studies
(e.g., Brotchie et al., 1987), is problematic, because of its attendant implications of simple,
linear, technological cause and societal effect. In their extreme form, deterministic
approaches deliver little but the `logic' of apparent technological inevitability, naive
Stephen Graham
181
assumptions about simple, cause-and-effect, social and spatial `impacts', and even
messianic and evangelistic predictions of pure, technological salvation.
The co-evolution perspective teaches us that such perspectives fail to capture the ways
in which new technologies are inevitably enrolled into complex social power struggles,
within which both new technological systems and new material geographical landscapes
are produced. The recombination perspective, on the other hand, teaches us that such
broad-brush transition and `impact' models ignore the full, contingent and relational
complexity surrounding the social construction of new technologies, within and between
specific places. It argues powerfully that, outside such contingencies, the meaning and
effects of new information technologies can never be fully understood or simply
generalized. To draw again on Thrift's (1996a: 1474) recent work:
seen in this light, electronic communications technologies are no longer an economic, social or cultural
earthquake, but rather a part of a continuing performative history of `technological' practices, a complex archive of
stances, emotions, tacit and cognitive knowledges, and presentations and re-presentations, which seek out and
construct these technologies in certain ways rather than others.
Secondly, however, we need to be equally wary of the dangers of adopting simplistic
concepts of space and place. Following the arguments of such authors as Giddens (1979),
Massey (1993) and Harvey (1993; 1996) we need to reject the extremely resilient
`Euclidean' notions, still implicitly underlying many treatments of the geographies of
information technology, that treat spaces and places simply as bounded areas, as
definable, Cartesian spatial objects, embedded within some wider, objective framework
of time-space. As Doreen Massey (1993: 66) suggests, places need to be defined in
relational terms, too, as `articulated moments in networks of social relations and
understandings' rather than as `areas with boundaries around`.
The message, then, is clear. Only by maintaining linked, relational conceptions of both
new information and communications technologies and space and place will we ever
approach a full understanding of the inter-relationships between them. For Latour's
`skein of networks' (1993: 120) involves relational assemblies linking technological
networks, space and place, and the space and place-based users (and nonusers) of
such networks. Such linkages are so intimate and recombinatory that defining space and
place separately from technological networks soon becomes as impossible as defining
technological networks separately from space and place.
The example of the contemporary city helps illustrate the point. Here, propinquity in
material space has no necessary correlation with relational meaning, as was always
assumed with the social physics concept of `distance decay', with positivist urban
simulations like the gravity model, and with many traditional planning treatments of the
unitary, integrated city (Webber, 1964). Complex place and transport-based relational
meanings ± such as access to physical infrastructure, property, labour markets, an
`innovative milieu', social interaction and the use of cultural facilities ± are constantly
being recombined with local and nonlocal relational connections, accessed via technological networks (telecommunications, long-distance transport networks and, increasingly, long-distance energy supplies too).
The `urban' thus can now be seen as a locus for many sociocultural, economic, and
institutional networks and practices, spread out over diffuse and extended regions, and
mediated by complex combinations of physical `copresence' and technological mediation
(see Healey et al., 1995). In some, the interlinkage and superimposition within physical
urban space form meaningful nodes and connections ± economic, social, cultural,
physical. In others, the place-based relations are outweighed by the technologically
182
Conceptualizing space, place and information technology
mediated links to far-off places. Thus, neighbours may or may not know each other's
names and have meaningful social relations. Adjacent firms may or may not create
meaningful linkages (adjacent back offices are likely to be tied intimately into their own
distant corporate telematics networks but poorly linked to each other). Urban public
spaces may or may not emerge as common cultural arenas in their articulations with
global media flows and exchanges. Complex, subtle and contingent, combinations of
electronic propinquity in the `nonplace urban realm' (Webber, 1964) and place-based
relational meanings based on physical propinquity and transport therefore need to be
considered in parallel.
Such recombinations of `technology' and `place' represent merely the latest processes
of urbanism and not some simple post-urban shift (Graham and Marvin, 1996). `Cities
cannot be seen as places which are leaking away into space of flows', writes Thrift
(1996b: 6).
This is to fundamentally misunderstand the ways in which new information technologies have normally acted as
a supplement to human communication rather than as a replacement. Innovations like the telephone, the fax, and
the computer are used to extend the range of human communication, rather than act as a substitute. It is not
either/or but both/and.
Complex relational webs emerge here. As the global financial networks linking London,
Paris or New York, or the TGV train networks linking Paris and the French provincial
capitals demonstrate, the technological networks that support these distant linkages,
while always local and always embedded in space and place, may actually provide
`tunnel effects' which bring certain spaces and places closer together, while pushing
physically adjacent areas further away (Graham and Marvin, 1996). The global divisions
of labour and telecommunications networks of transnational corporations (TNCs)
provide another perfect example. For, as Paul Adams (1995: 277) suggests, `in this milieu
of globalization, the buildings housing the various functions of a transnational corporation [headquarters, control, research and development, manufacture, etc.], although
dispersed around the globe, are intimately connected, yet they may have little or no
connection with offices or housing that are directly adjacent'.
The relationships between the USA, UK and Japanese urban systems to the global
financial capital that is sited within their nation are characterized by similar network±
territory tensions. Some of the world's most sophisticated telematics networks now
underpin such cities, linking them, 24 hours a day, through trillions of dollars of
submillisecond global financial transactions, into a global financial marketplace (and, not
uncoincidentally, the hubs of the global airline systems). One individual office building in
Wall Street, New York, houses a computer system which supports global electronic
financial trading of $1 trillion per day (UNRISD, 1995). Meanwhile, however, the
immediate, provincial `hinterlands' and domestic urban systems surrounding global
financial capitals often fail to integrate closely into such global technological networks,
despite the fact that they actually pass materially through or by them. Such relational
actor-networks strewn across the planet mean, effectively, that `the centres of two cities
are often for practical purposes closer to each other than to their own peripheries'
(Mulgan, 1991: 3).
But while cities are often spreading out to be vast, multicentred urban regions linked
into global networks, place-based relational webs that rely on adjacency, propinquity
and physical flows remain central to the experience of human social, economic and
cultural life. The two rely on each other; they recursively interact. For, as Storper (1996)
suggests, shifts towards growing reliance on telemediated information, image, electronic
Stephen Graham
183
transactions and financial flow, as well as the continuing importance of fashion, art, the
media, dance, consumption, leisure, research, play, collective consumption, travel, tourism, education and governance (Thrift, 1996b), place a premium on reflexivity, interpretation and innovation ± the key assets of urban areas. As he argues, `the worlds of
action which make up the [reflexive] city economy and society are hybrids, constrained
by the machine-like forces of late modern capitalism, but themselves enabled by the ways
that system not only permits, but in certain ways, thrives on social reflexivity' (Storper,
1996: 32).
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